New Delhi — Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization, prompting the building of upstream projects on international rivers. If water geopolitics were to spur interstate tensions through reduced water flows to neighboring states, the Asian renaissance could stall.

Days after the broken body of British teacher Lindsay Hawker was discovered in a fourth-floor flat in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, when the media feeding frenzy was at its most intense, a newspaper editor called me from London.

In March, when the U.S. State Department announced its new global survey of human rights, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the report demonstrated America's commitment to civil liberties, the rule of law, and a free press. “We are recommitting ourselves to stand with those courageous men and women who struggle for their freedom and their rights,” she said. “And we are recommitting ourselves to call every government to account that still treats the basic rights of its citizens as options rather than, in President Bush's words, the non-negotiable demands of human dignity.”

Japan Focus Introduction. History often taps us on the shoulder unexpectedly. War and occupation—and, more particularly, occupied Iraq vis-a-vis occupied Japan a half-century ago— is a good example of this

In this case, the tap on the shoulder really began in 2002 as a crude, hubristic shove. In the propaganda campaign that preceded the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, officials in the Bush administration frequently evoked the example of Japan after World War Two, where the U.S.-led occupation proceeded smoothly and ended happily in a democratic and prosperous nation staunchly loyal to the United States. President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, NSC director Condoleezza Rice, and many others repeatedly evoked this reassuring analogy before the invasion, and before chaos consumed Iraq. Astonishingly, the president has continued to do so up to the present day—using the fifth anniversary of V-J Day in 2006 to resurrect all the by-now tattered and torn analogies to World War Two and its aftermath, and using the Washington visit of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in April 2007 to murmur the same incantation.

This is the second article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations.

The debate over whether Japan should allow foreign workers in to make up for current and future labor shortages is dominated by the so-called foreign trainee program, which is overseen by the Japan International Training Cooperation Organization (JITCO). The program is itself the subject of a debate, which boils down to the age-old Japanese dynamic of honne vs. tatemae.

As some members of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan know only too well, Japan can be a very uncomfortable place when the right starts sharpening its rhetorical spears. The Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) discovered this to its cost last year when it wandered into the debate over prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine: a key issue for Japanese conservatives.

True to his word, Abe Shinzo is radically overhauling Japan's education system, the single most important item accompanying his attempt to revise the Constitution. In his basic policy speech to the Diet in 2006, the prime minister vowed to rewrite the Fundamental Law of Education, rebuild education and “nurture people who value their families, their communities, and their country.” That makes his reform agenda the most ambitious since 1947, when the education law, written under US occupation, swept away the fascist-tinged classroom policies of the Imperial era.

This article examines how issues “closest to home”—family, friends and furusato (home town/area)—affect Japanese war memories. It draws upon testimony illustrating the importance of “home” and analyzes how family and local identities impinge on the evolution of cultural memory and war commemoration. Examples are drawn from Hokkaido.

In 1938, Ito Yoshimitsu enlisted in the Sapporo Tsukisamu 25th regiment, part of the Seventh (Hokkaido) Division of the Imperial Army. He saw action in China before transferring to the military police (kempei) in 1943. At the end of the war he was stationed in Celebes in present-day Indonesia. There he was arrested by the Dutch after the war and executed as a BC class war criminal on 4 October 1948. Ito had been convicted of serious torture, including beating, burning with cigarettes and force-feeding water to Indonesian prisoners.

Japan Focus introduction: For more than five decades after the end of the World War II, Japan articulated an official identity as a pacifist, anti-nuclear nation both domestically and in the international arena (its formidable Self Defense Force notwithstanding). Since the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, however, the debate over revising Japan's “Peace Constitution” intensified. In particular, Article 9 of the Constitution, by which Japan renounces offensive war, has been under attack by politicians proclaiming the goal of becoming “a normal nation”, and the present Abe administration has prioritized Constitutional revision. Along with politicians and the citizenry, many intellectuals and artists have spoken against the possibility of Japan identifying itself as a “nation that wages war”–thus rejecting its assumed role as advocate of peace and foe of nuclear arms. In June 2004, Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo, along with artists and intellectuals Inoue Hisashi, Komori Yoichi, and Kato Shuichi and others, formed the Article 9 Association, which advocates “protection” or preservation of the present Constitution.

From early in 1945, Okinawa's geopolitical location at the southern border of ‘Japan proper’ made it an obvious and immediate target for the Allies' invasion of the mainland of Japan. In the most intensive land attack launched against Japan by the United States, the so-called ‘typhoon of steel’ rained down on Okinawans for months as the Japanese military dug in for a war of attrition.

The Asian/Pacific region, currently home to six hundred million older people, is the most rapidly ageing world region, with twenty percent of its projected population over sixty by 2050, which will at that date account for two-thirds of the world's two billion elders. Indeed, UN projections predict that by 2040 there will be more individuals aged over sixty than under fifteen in the region and Asia will have followed Europe in becoming the world's second so-called ‘mature’ region. Key here is the speed at which this transition is occurring. While it took the EU 15 (the 15 member states of the European Union prior to enlargement) some 120 years to go from being a young to mature population (with maturity being achieved in 2000), such a shift in the proportion of young and old will have occurred in Asia in less than 25 years. While the predicated increase in the percentage by 2025 of people over sixty for the EU 15 is around 33%, it is a staggering 400% for Indonesia, 350% for Thailand, and up to 250% for India and China. It is this rapidity of demographic ageing which will be central to the policy changes needed within the region.

When the European Union and China agreed to cooperate to develop the E.U. Galileo Satellite System in 2003, the United States reacted with strong skepticism since Washington was against the sharing of sensitive dual-use technology (with civilian and military applications) with China. In the past, the United States had tried unsuccessfully to impede the European Union's ability to set up Galileo, which is an alternative to the U.S.-established Global Positioning System (G.P.S.). At the time, U.S. analysts questioned why Brussels was spending money (3.6 billion euros) to duplicate an existing system that was available “for free,” and why it was eager to accept Chinese participation in the program.

I first found Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the Charles Tuttle Bookstore in Okinawa in 1960. I had just decided to spend some time living in Japan (little suspecting that “some time” would turn out to be a big part of the rest of my life) and I was delighted to discover that Benedict, whose Patterns of Culture I greatly admired, had written this book too. I read it avidly, and for some years was corrupted by the myth of (as Malinowski called it) the “ethnographer's magic”. I walked around Japan like a miniature Benedict, seeing “patterns” everywhere, and thinking it was wonderfully clever to be able to “analyze” the behavior of the people around me, including even invitations to dialogue and expressions of friendship. I claim no monopoly to this kind of attitude; in those days it was rampant within the community of Westerners in Japan, and especially among the Americans, so many of whom saw themselves not only as miniature Benedicts, but also as miniature MacArthurs (some still do today). After some time I realized that I would never be able to live in a decent relationship with the people of that country unless I could drive this book, and its politely arrogant world view, out of my head. The method I chose was to begin the research that led to the following essay.

During the last two decades, Japanese food succeeded in penetrating a wide spectrum of global gastronomy. From posh dining through healthy meal to a quick bite, Japanese cuisine is present in practically every niche of the ever diversifying restaurant market. While classic establishments proudly dish up kaiseki menus for the connoisseurs of exclusive dining, teppanyaki steak-houses provide culinary entertainment to those with less privileged taste buds, and sushi and noodle bars appeal to young customers.

In early 2007, the Indonesian government decided to withhold its bird flu virus samples from the World Health Organisation's collaborating centres pending a new global mechanism for virus sharing that offered better terms for developing countries. In breaking with the existing practice of freely sending flu virus samples to these laboratories, Indonesia expressed dissatisfaction with a system which obliged WHO member states to share virus samples with WHO's collaborating centres, but which lacked mechanisms for equitable sharing of benefits, most importantly, affordable vaccines developed from these viral source materials.

Like most people, museum professionals generally dislike being at the center of a firestorm of criticism. Yet in recent years, many Japanese and American museum curators have suffered this fate for their exhibits on World War II. As many scholars have noted, war remembrance is fraught with difficult issues, prominently including how to portray the motives, policies, and conduct of one's own government during the war. In both countries, curators, particularly those at public institutions, faced a sudden increase in vitriolic political criticism in the mid-1990s over how to remember the wartime past.

BEIJING–With more than two decades of market reforms under its belt, China has transformed into a trading powerhouse and the world's “factory.” It is also making its presence felt in the worlds of science and technology.

China's expenditure, in terms of purchasing power parity, along with its army of researchers, has already surpassed Japan's.

In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who directed atomic research at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. Robert Oppenheimer while vacationing in Michigan during the summer of 1942. Oppenheimer and the brain trust he assembled had just calculated the possibility that an atomic explosion could ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or the nitrogen in the atmosphere. If such a possibility existed, Compton concluded, “these bombs must never be made.” As Compton said, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.” Certainly, any reasonable human being could be expected to respond similarly.

Opposition to free trade is commonly treated as a heresy. Yet farmers in Japan, and in other countries across the Asian region, have persistently opposed the WTO order, and now oppose its extension through bilateral or multilateral Free Trade Agreements, of which most notable are those currently being negotiated between the United States and South Korea and between Japan and Australia. Commonly, those negotiations are conducted at high bureaucratic level, with direct input from major business federations but little or no voice for farmer and consumer groups. With the Doha round of WTO negotiations stalled, the United States, Japan and others are shifting their attention to bilateral FTAs. Ono Kazuoki, veteran of Japanese and Asian farmer movements, here comments on the projected Australia-Japan FTA. (Japan Focus)